


the viceroy

by besselfcn



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Past Geralt/Eskel, Winter At Kaer Morhen, Witcher Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29064402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Geralt is never going to invite him back to Kaer Morhen’s winters again.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 3
Kudos: 124





	the viceroy

**Author's Note:**

> I had tons of fun writing this for the Witcher Zine, "Of Swords and Steel". Hopefully you enjoy! <3

> _But aren’t you sorry you will never see_
> 
> _a tulip that would make you offer all_
> 
> _you own for the layered, translucent promise_
> 
> _in its brown paper wrapper?_

\-- Katrina Vandenverg, "Tulipomania"

* * *

Geralt is never going to invite him back to Kaer Morhen’s winters again.

Jaskier realizes this not when Vesemir sighs, remorseful but resigned, the moment Jaskier walks through the door and bows; not when Geralt’s old brothers-in-arms tease him about bringing back a bard this time and not a sorceress; not even when Geralt tells him _whatever they say, and whatever they tell you, don’t listen._

No. He realizes it after Geralt’s welcoming-back dinner, when they are all a bit drunk and Geralt and Eskel are laughing about some private joke and Jaskier has been idly plucking chords for the last fifteen minutes and Lambert shouts, “Oy, bard! Play us that fucking coin song!”

The rage that ripples through the room is instant. An apple goes sailing at Lambert’s head; he ducks and laughs, _roars_ even, as Eskel charges for him to tackle him to the floor and demand he take back the request under penalty of death as Geralt shrinks into his hands.

And Jaskier does the only thing he knows how to do in a room full of angry drunkards; he stands on the table and sings.

The chords of the infamous song echo beautifully along the old worn stone walls, as does Lambert’s laughter, muffled as it is under his brother’s grasp.

-*-

Then it’s quiet.

Well, not right then. He finishes the song and the witchers dutifully clap, and ask for another that’s _literally anything but that, sweet merciful gods_ , and so he plays and plays until they’re all a bit too drunk to enjoy the music properly, and they turn in to bed. Geralt shows him to his room — a little guest suite, simply furnished, with its own bath and the means to fill it, and then he goes off to bed and Jaskier shuts the door and _then_ …

Then it’s quiet.

A real sort of quiet — not the quiet you get at a tavern when the lights all go off but people are still laughing and talking in the next rooms over, or the quiet you get out in the wilderness surrounded by little things with littler legs that scurry about trying to find their way into your bedroll. This is the kind of quiet that comes behind stone walls a meter thick to protect against the biting cold and the howling of wolves.

Jaskier can hardly think in this sort of quiet, let alone sleep.

He remains put in his room for an admirable total of an hour and some minutes before peeking the door open to wander. Geralt had emphasized the entire way there not to touch anything that looked either (A) important, (B) suspicious, or (C) liable to collapse at any moment. (Jaskier’s point that he might have to refrain from touching Geralt their entire visit seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.) But surely little trouble could be generated from simply walking the halls and peering into doors left open.

He walks up and down the dormitory hall, tracing the same sort of path Geralt had walked as a child half a century or more ago. It gives him a strange sort of vertigo, imagining it that way. All the things the walls have seen. All the memories worn into the stonework.

He descends to the kitchen. It’s harder to be melancholy in a kitchen.

He’s putting this theory to the test digging through the bowl of fresh fruit left out on the center island when he hears the door open behind him.

“Not touching anything, Geralt,” he says quickly. “Going right back to bed, in fact, just out for a stroll —”

“Not your wolf.”

Jaskier turns. It’s not, indeed; it’s Eskel, the witcher with the deep grooves across half his face and the crooked smile across the other half. He walks over and plucks an orange out from behind Jaskier, then pulls his knife from his pocket and begins to peel it expertly.

“I hope you clean that more often than Geralt does,” is all Jaskier can say, and Eskel laughs but does not answer.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Eskel asks. “Not the first. Most first-time guests find the place a bit creepy at first.”

Jaskier scoffs. “You all have a lot of guests, then?”

Eskel fixes him with that _look_ that Jaskier had assumed was just a Geralt-look but seems like it might be a Witcher-look. “No.”

Jaskier shifts under the Look. “Oh.”

Eskel’s very methodical about his orange-eating habits. Jaskier watches him carefully peel off the white bits from each slice until they’re perfect and shiny, and then pop them one at a time into his mouth. It’s a ritual, he realizes, in the same way that Geralt has rituals. Count the potions, polish the saddle, re-wrap the sword hilt.

“I can hear you thinking, Bard.”

“No, you can’t,” Jaskier snaps automatically, before a sudden panic that maybe it’s true--maybe he’s just that much better at the Signs, like Geralt had grumbled before.

Eskel laughs. “I can’t,” he says. “But something’s bothering you, and it isn’t all the shitty crumbling architecture.”

“It’s a bit the shitty crumbling architecture,” Jaskier tries, mostly to dislodge the tightness in his throat.

Eskel just keeps looking at him. Jaskier wonders where he got that from — if he picked it up from Geralt, or if Geralt picked it up from him, or if they both got it from Vesemir or if —

“You know so much about him,” Jaskier blurts out. His chest tightens as soon as he’s said it.

Eskel laughs. “Who?” he says. “ _Geralt?_ Fuck, I don’t think I know a thing about Geralt.”

“But you _do_ ,” Jaskier snaps, and then it’s all the words spilling out of him at once, the way the words always fucking do for him. “You knew him _before_ he was Geralt. You — you knew him before he’d killed any monsters and when he was shit at using a sword and before his hair had gone all white. This whole _place_ did, all of you, and nobody else in the world _does_ , you know? It’s all just _here_ , and — and it’ll always just _be here_. Just… all legends and fairy tales, the lot of you. And here I am. Some poor fool who plays the lute.”

Jaskier drops his head into his arms, admittedly a bit dramatically. He doesn’t know how to look Eskel in the eye after such an odd and pointless tirade.

After a moment, Eskel says, “He’s still shit at using a sword.”

It shocks a laugh out of Jaskier, who’s still in the middle of looking rather pathetic.

Eskel plucks another orange out of the bowl in front of him and starts peeling it just as methodically as the first. “I get it,” he says. “You love him. No, no — I’m not saying you’re fucking him, or whatever. That isn’t even my business and I don’t want to know. But you love him. Everyone does, once they stop hating him. It’s just how Geralt is, am I right?”

Jaskier chews the inside of his lip. He thinks of a tavern in Posada, a disaster in Rinde, a bitter argument on a mountaintop, and all the times he kept on following after. He nods.

“Yeah. So you’re jealous. Because you think there’s something you’re missing, not having known him when he was all lanky and miserable about everything all of the time.”

 _Jealous_ seems like such a small word for the thing Jaskier feels thinking of Kaer Morhen. _Alone_ is closer, though he wasn’t even alive when Geralt was here, so it’s nonsensical to have been lonely for him then.

“He was different, though,” Jaskier says lamely.

Eskel nods, slow. His expression shifts a little, from quiet rebuking of Jaskier’s words to a soft sort of remembrance.

“He was,” Eskel admits. He speaks carefully, like he’s trying not to regret what he’s saying. “It was — a different kind of miserable. All that _I’ve got to help save this damsel in distress_ he’s got going on now. It was just that all the damn time.”

Jaskier tries to imagine it. Geralt, without the veneer of Geralt. He thinks he sees it break through the cracks sometimes around Eskel and Lambert, but it’s so fleeting it’s hard to notice without a Witcher’s senses.

“What happened?” Jaskier asks. “Why’s he so —”

“So Geralt?” Eskel laughs. “Yeah. I don’t know. Nothing exactly; the Trials were hard on everyone, and he got a few extra to boot. Don’t think it was that, though.”

Jaskier frowns. “What do you think it was?”

Eskel finishes his orange, sets aside the perfectly rounded peel. “I think,” Eskel says slowly, “that he did it to himself.”

Jaskier feels his breath catch in his chest, though he couldn’t say why.

“It’s hard to have a heart like that and be a Witcher,” Eskel says quietly. Now he’s the one who won’t look up, taking a very steady interest in his own hands. “I think Geralt realized that before the rest of us. Did something about it to keep it safe.”

Jaskier exhales. He imagines it, for a moment — Geralt with an unguarded heart, wandering around the world as something feared and hated. He thinks of how it might destroy a man, to live like that. How Kaer Morhen might be the only place Geralt is not only neither feared nor hated but _loved_ , respected, teased with song overlaid with good drink.

How Kaer Morhen has been sacked, and how there will never be another place like Kaer Morhen, or another witcher like Geralt.

 _Mourning._ That’s the emotion.

“Tell me a story about him back then,” Jaskier says. Pleads, almost.. “I’ll make an awful song of it.”

Eskel grins.

-*-

They ride out on the first melt of spring, promises of contracts and coin heavy in Geralt’s head. They saddle up and are sent away with good food and good wine, and a heavy pat on the back that knocks the wind out of Jaskier along with a warning that if he sings the coin song in those halls again he’ll be set out as griffon bait.

Jaskier waits until they’re far enough down the road that they’re likely out of earshot of even a witcher’s hearing.

“So,” Jaskier grins. “You and Eskel —”

In a low growl, Geralt says, “I’m never bringing you to winter again,” and kicks his horse into a gallop.

Jaskier follows after, breathless from laughing.


End file.
